The Impact Of Plain Language On Legal English In The United Kingdom

This volume offers insights into the ways in which plain language has influenced the language of the law in the United Kingdom, critically reflecting on its historical development and future directions. The book opens with an overview of the theoretical frameworks underpinning plain language and a brief history of plain language initiatives as a foundation from which to outline ongoing debates on the opportunities and challenges of using plain language in the legal domain. The volume details strands where plain language has had considerable impact thus far on legal English in the UK, notably in legislative drafting, but it also explores areas in which plain language has made fewer inroads, such as the language of court judgments and that of online terms and conditions. The book looks ahead to unpack highly topical areas within the plain language debate, including the question of design and visualisation and the ramifications of digitalisation, contributing to ongoing conversations on the importance of plain language both in the UK and beyond. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars interested in the intersection of language and the law as well as related disciplinary areas such as applied linguistics and English for Specific Purposes.

Weaving together theoretical, historical, and legal approaches, this book offers a fresh perspective on the modern revival of the concept of allegiance, identifying and contextualising its evolving association with theories of citizenship.

This collection on legal interpretation in a broad sense presents state-of-the-art linguistic approaches that are applied for studying interpretation and meaning generation in various legal settings. It covers different aspects of the concepts like judicial dissent, court argumentation, investigating sociological meaning, or comparing legal meaning in comparative law. Scholars can turn to the volume for methods and findings to ground their own inquiries, and students will find guides to topics and methods in the field of law, meaning generation, and language.

This book looks at the forces that have made traditional legal language what it is today and suggests some reasoms why the law needs plain English. It also shows why most of its peculiarities are unnecessary.

Machine translation (MT) has made huge strides in the last few decades. In the legal field, however, there are only a few academic works dedicated to exploring how MT can be successfully applied in legal translation practice. There is currently a gap in the literature that concerns studies on the automated translation of legal documents drawn up by international law firms and/or tackled by legal translators. This book bridges this gap by providing an in-depth analysis of MT in legal practice. It explores whether, and to what extent, MT can be considered reliable, or at least acceptable, in the legal field and in legal practice. It investigates whether MT target texts can be used as drafts to be processed further (i.e., post-edited), how we might tackle MT’s shortcomings, and how MT tools could be supplemented with other language resources.

Legal translation is hallmarked by peculiarities revolving around language intricacies, particular formulae, and system-specificity issues. At present, there is a spectrum of legal corpora dedicated to court-related topics and legislation, but there is no corpus composed of private legal documents such as contracts and agreements. This book wishes to bridge this gap by providing English-Italian comparable corpora related to the domain of (general) terms and conditions of service, together with a model for their use in the translation classroom. It offers a novel contribution to the scientific community as it makes corpora of private legal documents available for consultation. In addition, it shows that legal corpora built by following rigorous methods can become reliable tools in translator training and, most likely, in translation practice. This book is for students in Translation Studies, professional translators, researchers and scholars in legal language and legal translation, as well as legal practitioners and lawyers.

This history of legal language slices through the polysyllabic thicket of legalese. The text shows to what extent legalese is simply a product of its past and demonstrates that arcane vocabulary is not an inevitable feature of our legal system.

This collection bridges disciplinary scholarship from critical language studies, Latinx critical communication, and media studies scholarship for a comprehensive exploration of Spanish-English bilingualism in the US and in turn, elucidating, more broadly, our understanding of bilingualism in a post-digital society. Chapters offer a state-of-the-art on research at the intersection of language, communication, and media, with a focus on key debates in Spanish-English bilingualism research. The volume provides a truly interdisciplinary perspective, synthesizing a wide range of approaches to promote greater dialogue between these fields and examining different communicative bilingual spaces. These include ideological spaces, political spaces, publicity and advertising spaces, digital and social media spaces, entertainment and TV spaces, and school and family spaces. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in bilingualism, language and communication, language and media, and Latin American and Chicano/a studies.